Repeatedly I hear commentators wondering from where the philosophy behind Non-Crime Hate Incidents (NHCIs) arose.

NHCIs are topical because The Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson was investigated by Essex Police for a tweet that she had deleted a year before.  In an interview with Nigel Farage on GB News [at 19:05 hrs], she highlighted that NHCIs are against Free Speech. Since then, Essex police has stepped back from its investigation and now the Home Office has felt the need to bring common sense to bear [at 23:24 hrs] on NHCIs.

In Scotland, Hate Speech legislation has been implemented, after the usual consultation process was ignored.  Alex Salmond’s consultation about same sex relationships was also  ignored, in the same league as UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s ignoring the massive crowds of protesters who marched in London against the Iraq War. Similarly UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer marches on with his hidden or at least unpublished agenda, ignoring the protests of pensioners, farmers, employers and others after the recent Labour Budget. 

True to form, one of the Tory leadership contenders in Scotland, veteran MSP Murdo Fraser has fallen foul of the Hate Crime mentality and is challenging an NHCI against him for a tweet he made [at 23:48 hrs]. Fellow Christian, veteran SNP MSP John Mason has been expelled from his SNP Party for similar non-politically correct opinions tweeted on X.com. The use of NCHIs is shutting down Free Speech [at 18:35 hrs].

What is the answer?

Hate speech legislation is the result of abandoning Christianity.  Christianity calls hateful thought “sin” and handles it by preaching the Gospel. Secular Governents use the heavy hand of the law. Recent centuries show the change in religious thought. After hundreds of years of Roman Catholic persecution of Protestants for thoughts that the pope in Rome had outlawed, freedom of religion and freedom of thought was pioneered in Protestant Europe and exported to the American colonies where it was enshrined in the American First Amendment. Eventually Roman Catholics in Western Europe discovered that violence was not the way to make friends and influence people, far less to claim to be Christian.  Aggressive muslims and dogmatic secularists have still to progress along this pathway.

Since the 1960s secularism has been on the rise and Christian principles are being abandoned in Britain. Successive secular governments have overseen the rise in abortions, murders, divorce and crime in general.  In view of such lawlessness, secular government has discovered that it cannot win hearts by persuasion and so it resorts to the method formerly employed by Roman Catholicism by handing over to the secular authority to do its dirty work for it and to force its will upon the people. It is the same process when an offended person anonymously involves the police to handle their complaint.

Legislating for sin

In order to control hateful thoughts the secular state is now legislating for what Christians call sin.

The true Christian church deals with sin in a very different way.  Deliverance from sin is central to the Christian Gospel Mat 1:21. Christian preachers teach their hearers the basics of human behaviour, the Fall of mankind into our native sinful condition, and the only means of deliverance through the Lord Jesus Christ.  With few people attending church in the UK, a cost-effective way to teach the population, the Government has implemented its own wide range of measures to influence the population at great expense.

Where and when secularism does not succeed to persuade, it uses force, the full power of the State against the individual.  The whole of human history testifies to this malevolent method of government control.

True preachers seek to commend themselves to every man’s conscience 2Cor 4:2 by clear manifestation of the truth. Fake news nowadays is confusing public policy and is damaging social cohesion. Christianity teaches us to love our neighbours and even our enemies, so how do NCHIs assist in reducing “community tensions”, an idea which in itself Balkanizes a nation [at 23:25 hrs].

The Solution to the UK’s problem

Nigel Farage keeps asking the same question on GB News about “the root of all this” although I have emailed him three times about the answer, which have gone unacknowledged.

I began this blogpost while listening to Nana Akua’s GB News show on 16 Nov 2024 in which Edward Skidelsky, a lecturer of philosophy at the University of Exeter [at 17:08 hrs] traces Non-Crime Hate Incidents back a few decades to the era of the Macpherson Report.   He said: “[The existence of NCHIs] is completely contrary to the rule of law. … all it takes is for someone … to say I was offended …. It stays on your record … and can ruin your career … They are not rare … They have existed for over two decades … It is completely subjective; there is no evidence required. They should be scrapped.” [17:09 hrs]. He described it as “wrong think”, essentially a political crime, and called it “a real regression to the 17th century when church courts would prosecute people just because their neighbours did not like them”. He said that we need “to draw a sharp line between crimes and just being nasty to people, which is not a matter for the police” [17:13 hrs]. Like Nigel Farage’s repeated requests in his GB News programme, Nana Akua asked “how it happened” [17:12 hrs] that policing shifted to policing one’s thoughts. Skidelsky said that it was partly because the law has given people a right not to be offended and he traced its recent iteration to children in schools being encouraged to draw any offence to the attention of teachers, further developed with students in Universities going to the authorities when someone hurts their feelings. Sidelsky has stopped short of the full explanation.

1. a better example of people reporting neighbours is not 17th-century church courts but the Stasi in post-World War II East Germany. Michael Brown drew attention to this by adding to Sir Keir Starmer’s growing list of nicknames with “Starmer’s Stasi” [at 19:31 hrs] because the police are behaving like the Stasi in policing “wrong thoughts” with NCHIs. Nigel Nelson pointed out that there is no legal definition of “hostility” in the Hate Crime guidance [at 19:32 hrs].
2. however, “17th-century church courts” reminds us of the Roman Catholic practice in the 17th and earlier centuries, when it handed over its heretics to the secular authorities to burn them at the stake or to execute in some other gruesome manner.

Slowly, the subjective nature of NCHIs is being identified. Lionel Schriver says: “Hate speech is a slippery slope and the beginning of the end of free speech. Hate speech is in the eye of the beholder” [at 19:34 hrs]. Nigel Farage raised the issue of the “protected categories” [19:39 hrs] or “protected characteristics” in the Equality Act 2010 and he thinks that the legislation needs changing. The Scottish Christian Party identified the damage from this secular over-reach years ago, and said that the Equality Act needs to change or be abolished. The “protected characteristics” have a pecking order and are themselves not equal.

Slowly, commentators are catching up. Although NCHIs were developed by the 2014 College of Policing Guidance, some researchers have “traced them back to the 1999 Macpherson Inquiry” [14:25 hrs]. So far so good, but have they traced the source yet in order to find the solution?

The Equality Act 2010 and Hate Speech Laws are not the source but only symptoms of what began with the Macpherson Report.

The Scottish Christian Party drew attention to this over a decade ago. Our Manifesto predicted it would lead to the current shouting match in the major cities of the UK.

“The Scottish Christian Party does not support the claim that we have a right to give offence, but since the Macpherson Report has re-defined racism in subjective terms, ‘taking offence’ has become as important as giving offence. A private individual’s complaint instigating a police investigation simply because they have taken offence, when possibly no offence was intended, will prove to be unworkable, and will itself contribute to louder and louder protests by disparate groups who are offended. This new criminal offence has worked its way through Equalities legislation and it will only stoke up charges and counter-charges of being offended by each other’s speech and way of life. Those who can shout loudest and make most use of the judicial system will prevail. This is not the sort of society the Scottish Christian Party wishes to promote. We will introduce legislation to restore an objective definition of offence in order to restore free speech.”

Scottish Christian Party 2011 Manifesto

The problem is the subjective nature of offence incorporated into law, begun in the Macpherson Report. I will add to this blogpost when I finally hear a public commentator quote the Macpherson Report Recommendation 12. I have drawn attention to this repeatedly, to anyone who would listen, on this blog and in the recent General Election during a parliamentary candidates’ debate on Isles FM, Stornoway. Slowly, the mainstream are catching up.

Update:

3 Dec 2024: others are beginning to notice the pecking order [at 21:25 hrs] in the Equalities Act 2010. “It would appear now that according to the FA’s [Football Association] hierarchy, Islam trumps LGBT rights, and Christians somewhere at the bottom.”

4 Dec 2024: Patrick Christys continues to draw attention to woke Britain where “islam is at the top of the league and Christianity is in the relegation zone” [at 21:06 hrs]. He then concluded that LGBTQ is above the BLM in Woke Britain.

16 Dec 2024: NCHIs were developed by the College of Policing but Lord Nick Herbert, the chairman of the College of Policing, has now called on the Government for a complete rethink over NCHIs [at 16:42 hrs] and that the Government should consider scrapping the category altogether – not a moment too soon.

1 Mar 2025: the NHS now supplies halal meat, an example of prevailing by shouting the loudest [at 20:14 hrs] – a heckler’s veto.

18 Sep 2025: a good example to watch.